I’ve been exploring dockerizaton lately more and more and I think I like the idea of having my apps in containers. I am not going to lie, it does take some time to get used to, but it is pretty cool the things that you can do.

One thing that I think I wanted to accomplish was able to run X11 apps through docker. I found Docker Headless VNC container and that was slick. Where I was able to run a whole Xfce environment within a Docker container!!! kudos to those folks. Now, my challenge was that in my case, I didn’t want a fat image and/or configure each app to download of configuring. So, this wasn’t my solution at this time. So, I decided to explore further and found a way to run X11 from a Docker container in macOS. Below are the steps on how to accomplish this.

Install socat which is a “multipurpose relay.” This will allow us to call the display.

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brew install socat

Create you local Dockerfile. In this particular case, I am using Ubuntu latest (which at the time of this post is 16.04.1 LTS). On your terminal, you can do “vi Dockerfile” and paste the info from below in that file.

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FROM ubuntu:latest

RUN apt-get update&&apt-get install-yfirefox

RUN useradd-ms/bin/bash developer&&\

echo"\ndeveloper ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL">>/etc/sudoers

USER developer

ENV HOME/home/developer

CMD/usr/bin/firefox

Then, let’s build the Docker image by doing the following…

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docker build-tfirefox.

Now, on a different terminal, run the following command…

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socat TCP-LISTEN:6000,reuseaddr,fork UNIX-CLIENT:\"$DISPLAY\"

Then come back to your old terminal (or a different one) and run this command

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docker run-ti--rm\

-eDISPLAY=$(ipconfig getifaddr en0):0\

-v/tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix\

firefox

At this point, you should have opened a Firefox instance from your Docker container through X11 on macOS 🙂
If you didn’t… take a look at the steps again. Happy dev and opening other X11 instances.

After years of monitoring my data usage and going over, I decided to make a dashboard (yes, like your car dashboard) for my ISP data usage.

I decided to publish this piece of code with the hopes that would help other people setting something up, where they could be notified via text message/SMS on their current data usage and predict what their usage will be by the end of the [billing] cycle.

Recently I started to so some dev on python and noticed that on the server that I was going to do the work I don’t have sudo access. In the past, this has not been an issue, but in this case getting sudo access is almost impossible and not doable. So my only option is being able to run pip (to install python packages) as an user.

After painfully researching on how to successfully do this, I was able to make it work. I hope that this helps others in the future. Good luck!

Recently I wanted to install an application on a Mac, but it required an old version of R (3.2). On Linux and Windows, that is easy, since you install the application on its own path. Now, on a Mac, you can do it as well, but it will require extra work if you build it from source. There is something better!!! Here I outline what you can do easily…

Note that this illustration assumes that you want R 3.2 & 3.3 on the same system and be able to run either of them when you choose.

Let’s assume that you already installed R 3.3 by downloading it from CRAN.

To install R 3.2, you will need to download an old version from CRAN old R

There are a lot of ranking algorithms for you to use and represent your data. Now, that doesn’t mean that the ranking algorithm is the most appropriate for your situation. It all depends on what you are trying to accomplish and who will be the audience of your final product. Some ranking algorithms could be too sophisticated to be actually understood by a layman’s type of person. The reasoning to develop this particular piece of work was to not only rank specific type of datasets but be able to explain how the ranking is performed for the layman’s type of person.

The inspiration for creating this node came from this site -> http://www.psychstat.missouristate.edu/introbook/sbk14.htm. Now that this node exists, it allows us to reuse it over and over. According to the author of the site, transforming raw scores into percentile ranking, will enable us to: 1) Give us meaning and interpret the scores and 2) Provide a direct comparison between scores.

Now, the challenge was trying to get rJava working on RHEL. I could not find any proper documentation that worked. Instead, I ran into a bunch of posts and pointing to things that worked in their environment, but not on mine (so, this might not work on yours as well, but I hope it does). I usually like to give credit to the sources, but this time, they were so many over a long time span, that I could not remember what came from where anymore. So, I apologize for that. Below are the things that I did to get rJava working.

I finally was able to find a guide that was able to allow me to setup Moodle on 1&1 Shared hosting environment. To me, the only thing that I followed was deactivating “slash arguments” from “http://yourserver/admin/settings.php?section=http” section. Once I did that, then my web HTML 1.0 site, got converted into a web HTML 3.0 (at least).